Advocacy and Policy Analysis for the Computing Research Community

The prestigious Marconi Society, established in 1974 to honor Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel laureate who invented radio, is seeking nominations for its Paul Baran Young Scholar Awards. The award, “recognizes young scientists and engineers with the potential to make game-changing contributions in the field of communications and the Internet.” While this award is separate from the well-known Marconi Prize, the identified young scholars for the Paul Baran Young award are seen as having the potential to someday become Marconi Prize winners too.

The awards will be present in London on October 20th at the Royal Society. Awardees will receive $4000 cash prize plus $1000 in expenses to attend the event. This also gives an opportunity for these young scholars to gain well-deserved recognition, as well as meet and network with some of the industry’s best-known scientists and engineers. If you know a student who has, “demonstrated outstanding research capability, entrepreneurial spirit, and technical vision,” head over to the Marconi Society’s webpage to submit your nominations. The deadline is June 30th 2015.

President Obama released his annual budget request on Monday February 2nd (interesting note: Fiscal Year 2016 is the first time his administration released the budget on time). As we have done in years past, the CRA Policy Blog will be doing a series of posts on the assorted budget requests for key science agencies, particularly highlighting the ones that are of importance to the computing community. Check back for more agencies.

First up is the Department of Energy (DOE). The two key parts of DOE for the computing community are the Office of Science (SC), home of most of the agency’s basic research support, and ARPA-E. For SC, the office would see a very healthy increase of 5.4 percent from FY15 to FY16 (going from $5.07B to $5.34B). Seeing as the agency has limped through the Sequestration era with up-and-down budgets, this request is very good.

Perhaps most important for computing researchers is the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program. ASCR would see a huge increase in funding, going up by 14.8 percent (or $541M in FY15 to $621M in FY16). Most of the justification for this increase (~$87M) is set aside for the exascale computing initiative. In fact, Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz said that exascale computing, both hardware and software, is a “top priority across the Office of Science.” Some other details from ASCR’s request are that their user facilities are operating, “optimally and with >90% availability;” and “deployment of 10-40 petaflop upgrade at NERSC and continued preparation for 75-200 petaflop upgrades at the Leadership Computing Facilities” continue. Also, the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship is restored at $10M to, “fully fund a new cohort.” (You’ll recall we joined with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to call on Congress to preserve the CS Grad Fellowship program.)

Digging a little deeper, the majority of the ASCR increase — $77.5M — is provided for the High Performance Computing and Networking Facilities (HPCF) subaccount. The Mathematical, Computational, and Computer Sciences Research subaccount would receive a more modest increase of $2.5M.

The big question now is will Congress pass this request? While it is true that support for computing research is widespread and bipartisan, it is still unlikely that this budget will breeze through the legislative process. For starters, throughout his request, the President has rejected funding levels called for by the budget deal that brought us sequestration, or the mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts, that are still US law. In rolling back sequestration, Obama is making an argument that the country is coming out of the recession and that these cuts need to be replaced with something more targeted. It’s unlikely that the Republican-controlled Congress shares that view. In addition to the sequestration rollback, it’s likely that congressional Republicans will have a different set of priorities within the Dept of Energy budget about things like climate change, sustainable energy, and clean coal programs, and those will require adjustments throughout the proposed budget to accommodate. So chances are very good that the final FY16 budget for DOE will look very little like the President’s request. But there appears to be strong bipartisan support for DOE computing programs (see, for example, last week’s hearing), and ASCR has recently fared well even when other aspects of the Office of Science budget have been flat-funded (or worse). So perhaps a little cautious optimism is warranted.

We’ll be watching this budget, and the other science agencies’ budgets, as they progress through Congress this year. Check back for more updates.

On Wednesday January 28th, the Energy Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a hearing on, “Supercomputing and American Technology Leadership.” The witnesses that were called, who spanned the public and private sectors in high performance computing (HPC), gave the simple message that in order to out compete other nations, America needs to out compute them. And that calls for sustained funding for supercomputing resources and research.

The hearing was opened by Subcommittee Chairman Randy Weber (R-TX), who, in his opening statement, said that, “it is our job in Congress to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely, on innovative research that is in the national interest, and provides the best chance for broad impact and long-term success. The basic research conducted within the ASCR program (the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing and Research program) clearly meets this requirement.” He elaborated by saying, “high performance computing can lead to scientific discoveries, economic growth, and will maintain America’s leadership in science and technology.” Science Committee Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), in her own opening statement, echoed much the same points, saying, “public policies play a critical role in supporting the advancement of high performance computing, and in enabling our society and economy to directly benefit from this capability.” She pointed out that, “the U.S. currently hosts more than 45% of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world,” and that, “as we enter the world of ‘big data’, where thousands of devices all around us are generating millions of bytes of data to be analyzed, high performance computing is needed not just by scientists and government researchers, but by many civic and commercial enterprises as well.”

The panel of witnesses was a venerable who’s-who of high performance computing and science policy. They included Norman Augustine, board member of the Bipartisan Policy Center and an “old sage” of the science policy community (long time readers of this blog will recognize him as the co-chair of the National Academies study “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”); Roscoe Giles, Chairman of the DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, who spoke on what is happening at ASCR; Dave Turek, Vice President, Technical Computing, at IBM, who gave the industry perspective for HPC and insight into the long-term challenges the field is facing; and James Crowley, Executive Director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), who gave the perspective from the scientific community. You can read their testimony in full on the House Science Committee website.

The witnesses agreed that America needs to increase their investment in supercomputing. In response to a question from Ranking Member Johnson about how he would make the case to lawmakers to increase funding for research, Mr. Augustine said that in order to compete with other countries, we have to be faster at applying research to the economy and the best way to do that is through improved computing. Vice-chairman Dan Newhouse (R-WA) asked what Congress could do to remove barriers to allow the DOE National Laboratories to be able to better transfer research to industries; Mr. Augustine pointed out that much of industry doesn’t know what’s going on at the national labs and that he has found the best way to transfer knowledge is to move people. While Mr. Augustine understood the need to have tight conflict of interest laws, encouraging more movement of scientists between labs and industry would help speed up the transfer of research. Finally, a question from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) on what the next step beyond the use of silicon in computers could be; Mr. Turek pointed out that we have reached the limits of silicon and there is no single solution to this problem. The only option is more research to find more options. Dr. Giles, in response to Rep. Massie’s question, also pointed out that ASCR, and the Department of Energy as a whole, is in an excellent position tackle this problem, because it is physics based and DOE’s research portfolio is predominantly physics research.

The hearing was quite informative and completely free of political rancor. All the Representatives present asked insightful questions, and they walked away with a greater understanding of the challenges and promises of high performance computing. Hopefully this will translate into some good legislation down the road from the Science Committee.